TODAY IN HISTORY:
Attila the Hun suffers nose bleed
In 44 BC, Roman General Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of nobles that included Brutus and Cassius. In 453, Attila the Hun died of a nose bleed.
In 1493, Christopher Columbus returned to Spain from his first voyage to the Western Hemisphere.
In 1521, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Philippines during his round-the-world voyage. He died in a battle with natives on April 27th.
In 1603, French explorer Samuel de Champlain made his first voyage to New France as a member of a fur-trading expedition. The expedition explored the St. Lawrence River as far as the rapids at Lachine.
In 1862, a Canadian commission recommended the conscription of 50,000 men in case of war with the United States, which was in the midst of the Civil War.
In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional baseball team, was organized.
In 1892, the first escalator — the Reno Inclined Elevator — was patented by Jesse W. Reno of New York.
In 1913, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson held the first White House news conference.
In 1917, Czar Nicholas II of Russia abdicated after a four-day revolt by the armed forces. He and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks the following year.
In 1943, Canadian Pacific’s Empress of Canada, retooled as a troop ship, was sunk off the coast of West Africa after being torpedoed by the Italian submarine Leonardo da Vinci. Of the 1,800 people aboard, 400 were Italian prisoners of war and 200 Poles who had been released by the Soviet Union after Germany invaded. There were 392 fatalities: 340 passengers, including a majority of the Italian prisoners, 44 crew and eight gunners.
In 1945, after three weeks of fierce fighting, the United States took control of the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, although sporadic fighting continued. The battle for Iwo Jima was one of the deadliest of the war, resulting in the deaths of about 20,000 Japanese and 6,800 Americans.
In 1961, Prime Minister Hendrick Verwoerd led South Africa out of the Commonwealth, announcing it would become a republic on May 31.
In 1962, Donald Jackson, of Oshawa, Ont., won the world men’s figure skating championship in Prague. During his free skate, Jackson landed the first triple lutz jump in competition.
In 1973, aboriginals in Alberta won a settlement of nearly $200,000 because a 1877 treaty stipulated they should have been paid $2,000 annually. In 1975, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis died near Paris at
age 69. In 1990, the federal government decided that Sikh members of the RCMP could wear turbans and other religious garb while on duty. In 2003, the World Health Organization issued a global travel advisory and named the mysterious pneumonia that hit China, Hong Kong, Vietnam Singapore and Canada “severe acute respiratory syndrome” — or SARS. In 2004, astronomers announced the discovery of the furthest known object in the solar system at 16 billion kilometres away, a “planetoid” provisionally named Sedna. In 2010, a Saskatchewan court ruled convicted wife killer Colin Thatcher couldn’t make money from Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame, the book he wrote proclaiming his innocence in the 1983 murder of JoAnn Wilson.